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What is the slowest computer you ever owned?

  • Thread starter Thread starter TechPowerDown
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TechPowerDown said:
I always wondered what the turbo button on some of my ex step-dads computers were ment for, was it a overclock button?
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Sort of...

Turning it off was more of an Under Clock feature - Many games made originally for XT computers, which typically maxed out at around 6Mhz, where simply too fast to play on 286's, as they actually counted CPU cycles to control the speed at which the game ran.

If it was designed for a 4mhz XT, and you ran it on a 12 Mhz 286, it would pretty much become unplayable as it would be running in fast forward :\

So there was an option to run the PC at slow and high speeds I suppose to suite the needs of whatever you where doing at tie time.

As time went on this distinction got a little confused as it moved on to 386's & 486's... By then I suppose it became more about having a lower power / heat mode depending on the model? as even the slow speeds where beginning to pass beyond 20Mhz...

So yeah the "TURBO" button originally was only there to set the 286 to run at its NORMAL speed, or roughly half its speed by turning it off, for some degree of backwards compatibility, and it just kinda stuck with pc's for a few generations after that during which its actual purpose became a little lost & confused.
 
TechPowerDown said:
I always wondered what the turbo button on some of my ex step-dads computers were ment for, was it a overclock button?
Click to expand...

back then programs didnt have in built speed limitations, they went as fast as the code could be executed.

the turbo button could be used to make programs faster, or in reverse, it made the faster systems run SLOWER, so that older apps ran at normal speed.
 
TechPowerDown said:
After reading all these responses i couldn't imagine going back in time, using some of those right. I'm pretty sure i'd go insane.
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When I use the C-64 emulator I can rarely wait for a game to load without turning on warp mode, whereas I used to have to wait the 5 minutes it sometimes took for the game to appear. Some games that loaded from tape took so long to load that it would first load a minigame you could play while you waited for the actual game to load. No joke. Old computers taught patience. :)
 
Perseid said:
When I use the C-64 emulator I can rarely wait for a game to load without turning on warp mode, whereas I used to have to wait the 5 minutes it sometimes took for the game to appear. Some games that loaded from tape took so long to load that it would first load a minigame you could play while you waited for the actual game to load. No joke. Old computers taught patience. :)
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people would be bitching on every forum out there if they had to wait that long now. and some would be getting highend CPU's,ton of ram and raid 0 4 SSD's to get load time down :roll:
 
I had a buddy with a C64 - and some penguin game or something - thing would take AGES to load - then fail and you rewind the tape and try again and again before it loaded.
 
BazookaJoe said:
I had a buddy with a C64 - and some penguin game or something - thing would take AGES to load - then fail and you rewind the tape and try again and again before it loaded.
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That sounds like th 6th circle of hell :roll:
 
BazookaJoe said:
I had a buddy with a C64 - and some penguin game or something - thing would take AGES to load - then fail and you rewind the tape and try again and again before it loaded.
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that would be going out of the window while i :banghead:
 
BazookaJoe said:
I had a buddy with a C64 - and some penguin game or something - thing would take AGES to load - then fail and you rewind the tape and try again and again before it loaded.
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They used to make games on tapes? lol. when did floppy's become a big thing, and i've heard rumors they haven't always been 3 1/2"
 
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TechPowerDown said:
They used to make games on tapes? lol. when did floppy's become a big thing, and i've heard rumors they haven't always been 3 1/2"
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Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg


Edit: Perseid beat me too it :p
 
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Haha. Jinx! :)
 
TechPowerDown said:
lol @ 8 1/2" floppy, maybe those ones were floppy, i never understood why they called them that...
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They were thin and floppy, but when 3 1/2 inch came out they used harder plastic but the tech was the same, so they didn't change the name. A lot of kids at school called 3 1/2s 'hard discs' because they weren't floppy and it used to annoy me to no end. LOL
 
The slowest PC i still have (fully fuctional:) is a Pentium 2 MMX 200Mhz with 128Mb of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo 2 12Mb VGA, with a 800Mb (yes megabytes) HD, the HD has a lot of old games in DOS, like Cisco Heat, i played that game a lot, like a crazy kid. I played C&C, and C&C Red Alert for hours on that PC. Good old times:rockout:
 
Floppy discs were floppy until the 3 1/2 came out.

This is the first comp I remember.....Vic 20 ftw bitches.
vic20oldtoplarge.jpg
 
This was only in 1998 where me and my family started a little late in the computer industry ;)
We got our first Windows 98 and my goodness.. It was so terrible I don't even want to remember the specs. Thing literally almost burned down. O.o
 
A little more info on the "Turbo" button for anyone who cares.
Early programs used "no-op" statements to delay the execution of the program. So if you wanted to delay the program 1 second, you did a loop of some number of no-ops and then continued on. This is how the graphics were originally timed.
A no-op statement just told the processor to do nothing (waste a couple of CPU cycles)
As you can guess a program written to run at normal speed on a 1MHz processor would run four times as fast on a 4MHz processor (a good example was the original Space Invaders for the PC). So basically you started the game and the aliens would marched down and destroyed your ship before you could react. rolf.
Thus the "Turbo" button. To slow down the processor for compatibility with games written that way. A more appropriate name for it would have been "Slow Down" button. You always ran the computer with the turbo on for everything other than incompatible games.

Now programs use timers and the system clock to get actual delay times regardless of the CPU speed.

I would like to see the original 1MHz Space Invaders run on a 3GHz processor just for the fun of it.
 
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P2 @ less than 400Mhz and 16mb of ram.

it also ran 56k modem. this was back in the late 90's. like 1998-99.

may have been a P1...
 
Back in 97' (high school) I had a Pentium 2 running @ 233mhz and with 512K of L2 cache.....wow:laugh:
 
DonInKansas said:
Floppy discs were floppy until the 3 1/2 came out.
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Perseid said:
They were thin and floppy, but when 3 1/2 inch came out they used harder plastic but the tech was the same, so they didn't change the name. A lot of kids at school called 3 1/2s 'hard discs' because they weren't floppy and it used to annoy me to no end. LOL
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The disk media itself is floppy. The case was not. Hard case, floppy disk. It's still a floppy disk. :D

FLOPPY35.GIF


inside_floppy_disk.jpg
 
Kreij said:
A little more info on the "Turbo" button for anyone who cares.
Click to expand...

And to expand on this a little further let me quickly explain the "Runtime error 200 - Division by 0" that many of us old - timers began to suffer as we moved on to newer Pentiums, and our old favorites gave up on us.

Basically as pc's got faster they needed a way to keep the "speed" of programs, such as games, constant so the play experience would be similar from one machine to another.

No longer able to "time" a game based on CPU speed a new method was developed where by every time the game/program started up, a mundane predictable equation such as (FOR EXAMPLE AND EASE OF EXPLANATION ONLY - Yes I KNOW it wasn't this EXACT method - I'm just explaining the general Idea) "10 x 10" would be performed lets say 1000 times. the program would take the time down to the thousandth of a second before and after performing this quick test loop and calculate how long it took to perform the test.

This could then be used to calculate how many loops of said test equation one would have to do to take exactly 1 millisecond, (1/1000 of a second) then, in the game programming itself, if it called for an event to be delayed by lets say 100 milliseconds it would then perform the test loop that many times*100 at that part of the program, an a delay of the same rough amount of real world time would be achieved across a wide range of CPU speeds

By recalculating this figure at start up every time a program was run it was always reasonably well calibrated, and this worked great until round about the Pentium era, where this initial reference loop test began to take LESS than 1 millisecond to perform.

Then when it became time to DIVIDE the number of loops VS time passed, 0 time had passed during the test as the test was only timing down to the thousandth of a second, and as said the reference test took LESS than 1/1000 of a second.

And BAM "Runtime error 200 - Division by 0" and yer game crashed :\ and all of a sudden our fancy new pc's couldn't run many of our old classics because they where just too fast.

Note : Technical fellows - I KNOW that this is not the 100% exact method but I'm trying to keep things short here :)
 
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